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If this is the sort of thing that winds up in large custom supercomputers then it won't matter that it uses 375W. If there is demand, Cray or someone similar will build custom racks to house and power these wild hogs.Reply

On the other hand, low end workstation cards have never had the performance to justify their cost.When the majority of the cost is drivers and validation they have to cut too much hardware to get the price down.They probably aren't considered very cost effective by the market making them lower volume than a card like that needs to be.I only really seen low end workstation cards in mobile workstations anymore.Still, it sucks for individual and small businesses that don't worry so much about performance, but need the functionality.Reply

I know very little about using GPU's for HPC (other than it is awesome and powerful), but looking at numbers, I was wondering:The HD 7970 GHz claims 1.01 TFLOPS double precision, and the S10000 offers 1.48 TFLOPS double precision, but at about 7 times the cost. Is the difference of having ECC memory worth that much, and that critical to HPC?Reply

Ask yourself, what would happen if I tried to use the HD7970 intensively 24x7x364? How long would it last? Now, suppose you had to do a calculation that took a few weeks to complete. How confident can you be that your results are correct if you use the HD7970? What if something happened to your HD7970, a tiny hardware hiccup or small power transient or even a software glitch, such that it causes a hang or crash in your program, and you had to restart your calculation all over again when it was just a couple days from being finished? In this scenario, how much would you be willing to pay for the assurance that your graphics card is going to perform as required? Changes to the design of the card itself, as well as the extra testing each one has to go through, cost money. Sure, there is a larger profit margin, but some of that is also needed to support the customer in case there are problems.Reply

I'm not sure I get the real advantage of this card over the K20 and K20X. K20X delivers a total of 5.26 TFLOPS peak performance using only 225w, this thing can achieve a total of 7.39 TFLOPS BUT needs a high TDP of 375w which makes K20 and K20X more power efficient (single card comparison). For a large server, this might be a good choice given the huge memory bandwidth and lower overhead saved due to lower number of cards needed to meet the target performance.Reply